Veteran sports writer Jim Utter covers NASCAR for The Charlotte Observer and its racing site, ThatsRacin.com. In this space, Jim writes about all things NASCAR and other forms of racing which may also be relevant ... or not.

Friday, February 8, 2013

The Wood Brothers rise again

A great deal of the Wood Brothers' success in NASCAR came well before new fans started paying attention. But in recent years, the Wood Brothers have taken center stage iN NASCAR again for several reasons - the induction of Leonard and Glen Wood in the NASCAR Hall of Fame and Trevor Bayne's surprise win in the Daytona 500 in 2011. After Friday night's induction ceremony, Eddie Wood was asked if the recent spotlight has helped raise the visibility of his family's contribution to NASCAR's history. "It really has.It probably really started
when David (Pearson) got in the Hall of Fame, which was in '10, I guess, or '11.And we changed the ‑ to honor David's accomplishments and his Hall of
Fame induction, that's when we went back to the red and white car that they had
had for so many years," he said. "That seemed to just be the
right thing to do that day.I'm not even sure how we came up with
it, it was just like, let's just do it, and the guys at Motorcraft said, okay,
that's fine. "That just started that whole
ball rolling, and then we got fortunate enough to win the 500, and dad getting in and then Leonard getting in.You know,
there's a lot of young fans that are really, really young that probably ‑ they
don't know anything about what happened in the '60s and '70s and stuff like
that, but that did ‑‑ I mean, just the attention that we got since then has just
been like it was back in the '70s with winning a lot of races, which is really,
really cool. "I was a little bitty part of
that in the '70s.I was his gopher, but I was there.So I remember all of that and how much fun it was and how special it was. Winning that race kind of
brought all that back. And then the people, we heard
from people after we won that race that we hadn't heard from in 40 years.I mean, it was just unbelievable the attention that it brought, which
is ‑‑ that's NASCAR.That's the way it works."